If you want to see what total ideological capture looks like, look no further than the International Olympic Committee allowing two male boxers to fight women at the Paris Olympics.

Preventing male boxers from being allowed to repeatedly punch women in the face should be an obvious and easy decision for any sports administrator to make.

That’s the decision that the International Boxing Association made in 2023 when it banned Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria from competing as women after sex testing revealed that they were males with XY chromosomes. The IOC’s refusal to do the same makes clear the stranglehold that ideology has over it. And it is female athletes who are paying the price.

The IOC was fully aware both these athletes were male when it allowed them to compete the women’s competition in Paris. Somehow, the world’s media, which collectively paid billions of dollars for the rights to cover the Olympics, failed to pick up on the scandal until a small independent outlet, Reduxx, reported it after the games had already started.

Once the story was revealed, there was a wave of condemnation from around the world. Former boxing world champion Barry McGuigan summed it up when he said “It’s shocking that they were actually allowed to get this far, what is going on?”

As always when it comes to the absurdity of gender ideology, the cover up is an essential part of the plan. No sensible person supports males punching women in the face in the name of sport, which is precisely why it was kept quiet.

For many years now, the IOC has taken a cowardly approach to protecting women’s sport, passing the buck to individual sports to make the call on barring males from competing in the women’s category. Yet on this occasion boxing administrators had stepped in and prevented the two male boxers from entering the women’s world championships, only for the IOC to reverse that call and allow them to compete in Paris.

The IOC’s ridiculous excuse for allowing this dangerous and idiotic travesty to occur was that their passports say they are women. Yet as we know, self-ID policies enacted in many countries over the last decade mean that people can select to have a passport, birth certificate or other ID document show their self-declared gender identity instead of their biological sex.

This is the crux of the debate about women’s rights and gender ideology. Activists and the organisations they’ve captured say that if a male’s passport says he’s a woman, he’s entitled to punch a woman in the face at the Olympics. Or use women’s changerooms and public toilets. Or be placed in a women’s prison if he commits a crime, even if that crime was a sexual assault against a woman or girl.

Women from all walks of life are pointing out that this is an extremely dangerous situation for women who are then forced to share these spaces or sports with males. Incredibly, the majority of the media, the celebrity and academic classes and the bureaucracy have sided with those who want men to be allowed in women’s boxing, rather than with the women who point out how dangerous that is.

The problem that captured organisations like the IOC have is that once you sign up to the mantra that any male who says he is a women is a woman, the activists you’ve become beholden to won’t let you make an exception, even when it results in two male boxers punching women in the head in front of an audience of billions.

To do so would be to admit the obvious – a man doesn’t become a woman because he says so, or because a government gives him a piece of paper saying he’s a woman.

Over the last five years I’ve raised repeatedly with Australian authorities, including the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Olympic Committee, the danger to women of allowing males to identify into women’s sport. On each occasion, they’ve brushed these concerns aside with condescending statements about ‘inclusion’ being a greater priority, and false claims that women and girls playing community sport are happy to compete against males.

There’s no question that Australian sport is wildly out of step with the international sporting bodies governing swimming, athletics, rugby, cycling and others which have committed to keeping the female category single-sex. Now, with two Australian women competing in Paris in a category with male boxers, we see on full display the unfair and untenable result of this lack of leadership.